Category: Most Innovative Marketing or Advertising Professional of the Year

Entry Title: Kumar Manix

Kumar Manix is the Founder and Creative Director of The Spaceship, a brand activation agency that is based in Sydney and works globally.

He specializes in blending the creative and the commercial with an entrepreneurial flair, and brings to each project a deep level of strategic thinking and industry knowledge honed by years of experience working with blue chip brands.

At The Spaceship, Kumar leads a talented and highly motivated team that seeks to approach campaigns with a provocative and adventurous spirit, as well as a strong sense of fun, but is still relentless in achieving strong, demonstrable results for their clients.

Together with his team at The Spaceship, Kumar’s goal is to find innovative and inspiring ways to transform customers into fans, content into ideas and ideas into experiences.

He has lead a wide range of high profile campaigns for his clients (including Microsoft, Foxtel, Samsung, Intel, Coca Cola and Adobe) and achieved enormous success, driving millions of dollars’ worth of earned media and inspiring epic levels of fan engagement.

As a marketer, his campaigns have seen him collaborate with some of the greatest storytellers in the world including Oprah, the BBC, Disney and Marvel.

Through his innovative use of video to drive engagement, Kumar has taken fans on numerous adventures to thrilling places, such as 100,000 ft. into the sky on a space balloon, leaping off a building with Lara Croft and driving at 280 km/h in a racing car with The Stig.

He has worked extensively in the Asian market, primarily in China and Singapore but also Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. His deep understanding of the unique character and requirements of consumers in Asia has helped him to achieve extraordinary results, including working on the launch of the Xbox video game console in China in 2014 following a decade-long ban on foreign video game consoles.

One of the key reasons for Kumar’s continued success connecting with consumers across all markets is his detailed knowledge and instinctive understanding of technology as an enabler for marketers to achieve more.

Under Kumar’s leadership, the Spaceship team have explored and celebrated many cutting edge uses of technology including live streaming, interactive platforms, gesture-based technologies and virtual reality.

His passion for technology and fan engagement has also seen him put his money where his mouth is, and he recently established two start-ups: an artist-based fan engagement platform called Clyppin and a social fundraising platform called Movement.

Outside of his work, Kumar is happily married and the father of two children, Kiran and Ria. He is a sports tragic, lover of street food from all over the world and owns an enviable collection of sneakers.